Next monday I'm releasing a new free ebook. A big reason for the success of the both The Little MongoDB Book and The Little Redis Book is because 10Gen and the Redis community really took the advertising to a level I had never expected.
This new ebook is different. It's more personal and it won't have the same type of community support as the last two.
Anyone have advice for how to best promote a free tech book?
1. Make sure it as easy as possible to access your work. Even though it is free, you are still asking a lot from your readers by asking them to pick your content over all the other content out there. For example I made a built-in player for the website and a one-click download link.
2. Send a brief email to people you respect within the community. This could be bloggers, other writers, forum posters. For the last year I collected a list of websites that I liked and when the album was done I had a nice list of people to contact.
3. Accept donations! I was surprised by how many people wanted to give me money. There's nothing wrong with this if you don't be a jerk about it.
I guess this is mostly pretty obvious, and there's no substitute for having good content!